According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, roughly 30% of the food produced for human consumption every year is lost or wasted. A team of Australians have developed an app to clean up the inefficiencies that are leading to all of this waste. Sam Webb, BlockGrain’s COO, talks to us about how they hope to completely revolutionise the movement of commodities around the world using blockchain technology.

Earlier this year we caught up with Dr. Gopi Krishna Vijaya. He holds a PhD in physics and has devoted most of his life to the relationship between humans and the development of technology. He had just flown over from the US to run the Moral Technologies Forum (organised by Seed Australia) in Melbourne on morals, technology and how to be a good human in our digital era. Covering the historical development of technology, the way we think and modern education, Dr. Gopi Krishna Vijaya discusses the intrapersonal relationship between humans and the technologies that we have created.

Word on the street is that the robots are coming, so look busy. But are they really going to leave us as bewildered and jobless as we think? According to Monash University’s Will Nash, that might not be such a bad thing.

With research showing that Virtual Reality headsets are helping chronically ill children experience less anxiety and less pain during their hospital procedures, we immerse ourselves into the world of VR at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and take a look at what they’re doing to help those fighting cancer.

As 3D printing gets progressively experimental, one Melbourne-based Canadian is hoping to use his research into glass printing to help move us towards a fully sustainable society. Oh, and he might just have solved part of our global problem with waste in the process.

Lucy McRae is fascinated about the relationship between humans and technology and through her art, filmmaking and work with institutions like NASA and MIT explores how science is slowly reconstructing our body and what that means for our future existence.

As technology continues to push us ever forward, it’s easy to forget that past journeys of discovery were once slower and without answers – asking questions was all part of the process. Angie Abdilla is a Trawlwoolway woman and founder and CEO of Old Ways, New, a research and technology design consultancy, who thinks this old way of doing things can be used to develop new technology.

Marissa Rosenberg is a NASA-based neuroscientist who is so enthusiastic about virtual reality she’s using it to train astronauts for their return to Earth. She talks to us about exactly how to become an astronaut, the importance of technology in modern space travel and just how NASA are gearing up for life on Mars.

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Matters Journal—responsible business, sustainability, social impact.

Matters Journal acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the land on which we work, the Wurundjeri, Boonwurrung, Wathaurong, Taungurong and Dja Dja Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation and we pay our respects to their Elders past and present.